Buckle up fellas, women's sport is winning all the plaudits

Listen, I hate to be tooooo downbeat, but has this been the biggest stinker of a year for Australian men's sport, or what?

I put it to you: when the days grow cold and we grow old what are the things we will remember? Go on, look back.

I say for starters that 2018 will be forever the year of the sandpaper outrage in cricket debacle. One Sunday morning in late March, Australia woke to the extraordinary news that overnight in South Africa, one of our players had taken sandpaper to the ball to make it swing more, while Australia's captain and vice-captain looked on benignly.

Toast of the town: The Matildas underlined their popularity by attracting huge crowds – in Penrith and Newcastle – to the recent series against Chile.Credit:AAP

The fallout from that affair would go on all year, sweeping away not only those three players but also everyone close enough to be even partially blamed for the culture that begat it. And it would be the year that cricket broadcasting went from Channel Nine to a combination of Channel Seven and Foxtel. Hundreds of thousands of viewers appear to have gone missing in the process.

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Rugby? It was the year the Wallabies lost just about everything going. They had just four wins from 13 Tests played, with their losses including ritual thumpings by the All Blacks, a slaying by traditional rivals England and a rare Wallaby walloping by Wales.

Our blokes played ordinary rugby in forgettable fashion and too often struggled just to get the most crucial building blocks of victory into place – with scrums on our feed being lost, as were lineouts and the ball turned over for such things as the most basic of all basics, throwing the ball in straight. There have been vintage years in Australian rugby – 1984, 1986, 1991 and 1999 spring to mind. But this was not one of them. Crowds were well down at the Tests, as were ratings.

Breakthrough: Isabelle Kelly of the Blues scores the match winner during the State of Origin at North Sydney Oval. Credit:AAP

Rugby League? The most memorable thing was that NSW won the Origin in handsome fashion against Queensland, while the Roosters triumphed in the grand final, courtesy of Cooper Cronk turning in an extraordinary year to get them there in the first place, and then just enough on the day, with a busted wing, to get them over the line.

There was some superb matches but, overall, both crowds and ratings were down. Off the field, the extraordinary saga of Jarryd Hayne dominated the headlines. We will let justice take its course, but whatever the courts decide, I suspect 2018 will stand as his final year in the NRL.

Football? A so-so year. At least we got to the World Cup, but apart from a commendable draw with Denmark, and narrow loss to France, didn’t really do much.

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Aussie Rules, meantime, continued to go from strength to strength and here in Sydney their rate of growth remains staggering – with more and more schools, including one-time nurseries of rugby union starting to sprout Aussie Rules goal-posts.

All up though?

All up 2018 was the year where most of the major male sports receded, while women’s sports advanced – many of them becoming torch-bearers for the popular imagination when their male counterparts faltered.

In the Super W, the inaugural 15-a-side women's comp, NSW got over Queensland in an extra-time nail-biter, and the Australian women’s rugby sevens side won the World Series.

In rugby league the first women’s State of Origin was played at North Sydney Oval and won by NSW – with the most inspirational image being two of the players, who are partners off the field and opponents on it, kissing after the final whistle. The Women's NRLW also got away to a good first season.

The Wallaroos meanwhile shared the field with two Bledisloe Cup matches to create double-headers, at ANZ Stadium and Eden Park, and even though they were handily beaten by New Zealand, they played great rugby and it generated a great deal of interest.

In the cricket, the Australian women’s team romped home in the women's T20, while the women’s football team, the Matildas, made the final of the Asian Cup, were undefeated in the Tournament of Nations (battering Brazil and Japan in the process) and sold out a friendly match against Chile in Penrith while Sam Kerr was judged the fifth best female player in the world.

Netball went from strength to strength with our women winning the Constellation Cup to reassert dominance over the Kiwis – RAH! – while the domestic competition saw ever bigger crowds and ever bigger ratings due to being on free-to-air television.

Listing badly: It's been an agonising year for the Wallabies – and even worse for their fans.Credit:AAP

And, of course, there were many fine individual female performances with Cate Campbell winning three gold medals in the Commonwealth Games, Stephanie Gilmore securing her 7th world surfing title, Jessica Fox becoming the greatest individual canoeist of all-time by winning her sixth world crown and Minjee Lee became the first female golfer to win the Greg Norman Medal for Australia’s best golfer of the year. And there was Ash Barty, starting to make enormous headway in women's tennis!

You get the drift.

Everywhere you look, 2018 was the year of women’s sport rising.

Next year? I frankly expect more of the same. Women’s sport has momentum that is building, and in what is effectively a zero-sum game, the growing interest in them has to come from somewhere, and a lot of it is being drained from men’s sport. Buckle up fellas, the next few years might be tough.